the smoothie’s new clothes

an interactive book to help kids with autism

This little book was created in response to a change that innocent made in their packaging. When the design of the kids smoothies packaging changed in 2016, a number of parents got in touch to let innocent know that this had caused a major problem from their autistic children who really struggle with change. For many of them, innocent smoothies were one of their only sources of fruits and vegetables, which made it all the more important to help them through the change. In response, I created this book, in collaboration with a copywriter in the team. Through research we discovered that children with autism like to learn in interactive ways. This led us to create a pop up book which explains how the smoothies have changed their clothes, but inside they’re still the same. The books were produced individually, finished by hand and sent to 10 families. Although initially we were skeptical if the books would help, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re hoping to do a second print run soon.

The concept for this project was initially developed in a day, as part of innocent’s Fedex days initiative. These days are intended to allow creatives the opportunity to have one day where they focus on a specific problem and come up with a creative solution. Kind of like a hackathon.

The problem presented to us was how to address the issue that autistic children who struggle with change were no longer drinking innocent kids’ smoothies.